Chris Selley: OneCity should be the start of a transit discussion, not the end

OneCity should be the start of a transit discussion, not the end: Chris Selley

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For the umpteenth time this week, Karen Stintz insisted that her mayoral ambitions are but a figment of the media’s fevered imagination. But with the announcement of her and Glenn De Baeremaeker’s 30-year, $30-billion OneCity transit plan, she could easily be seen as moving in for the kill on one of Mayor Rob Ford’s key policies.

Of the 20 transit projects OneCity proposes, its stated top priority is to replace the Scarborough RT with a subway instead of the planned LRT line. It also includes extending the Sheppard subway west to Downsview station and the Yonge subway north to Steeles, and creating a “Don Mills Express” subway from downtown to Don Mills and Eglinton and two “express” lines running from west and east from Union Station along rail corridors to the airport and Steeles. Lots and lots of subways, in other words. One can already picture the smug look on certain councillors’ faces after Rob “Subways, Folks” Ford votes against it.

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And he will vote against it, he vowed this week, because OneCity proposes to have Toronto ratepayers foot roughly one-third of the bill: The average household would pay the equivalent of 1.9% per year more in property tax to fund it. We cannot afford that, according to Mr. Ford. And besides, he said, the private sector can fund and build subways.

Oh, right. That. The problem is, not only could the Mayor not convince the right people that such a financing model could fund his Sheppard subway extension. He couldn’t even convince them not to kill the Sheppard subway extension. Mr. Ford’s subway plan is pushing up daisies. It has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-subway plan. But here he is dismissing as unrealistic and unfeasible a plan that would cost the average Toronto household just $45 extra per year, to a cap of $180 by 2016.

Never count Mr. Ford out. But if he really intends to haul that act out on the campaign trail in 2014, Ms. Stintz ought to be able to make mincemeat out of him.

It is a perverse and positive result of Mr. Ford’s failed subways-on-the-cheap pitch that the city now seems more amenable to a huge, long-term, taxpayer-funded transit plan. Not long ago, there was a widely held belief on both the left and right that we were essentially hostages to the provincial and federal governments’ whims. But as the subway wars were fought at City Hall, you could feel another sentiment building: “Screw this, let’s do it ourselves.”

Of course, the OneCity plan imagines the federal and provincial governments matching Toronto’s contribution to a dedicated transit fund. But the city’s portion alone — $272-million per year — could make a significant dent in Toronto’s transit deficit. We should embrace that idea, and we should explore any other revenue-generating tools potentially available to us, from parking revenues to tolls or, as conservative councillor Norm Kelly recently suggested, a sales tax. Great cities find a way to build great transit.

But OneCity is far too much, far too political and far too hasty. It’s great to have a 30-year, $30-billion plan. It’s not so great to unveil it on June 27 with an intention to bring it to city council in July and vote on it in October. At a press conference Wednesday morning, Mr. De Baeremaeker argued that time was of the essence, in part, because work would soon begin on the Scarborough LRT project. That’s a lousy reason to rush this behemoth. A better approach would be to look to the future and keep our paws off fully funded and approved existing transit plans — both in Scarborough and on the Union Station-airport link, which OneCity proposes to run as a subway line with both local and express trains. That’s a fine idea, but we needed an airport link 25 years ago. Build the damn thing.

Quite apart from the millions of technical questions that need answering, approving OneCity in such a short time span would be to sow the seeds of its eventual dismantling, à la Transit City. If Torontonians are amenable to ponying up for the transit they deserve, that’s fantastic news. But that should be the beginning of a long discussion — at the TTC, at council, on the election trail, and maybe even in a referendum — not the end of it. A plan this big needs to be as widely accepted, and as meddle-proof, as humanly possible.